


Ticket home

by Rayj4ck



Category: DuckTales (Cartoon 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Post-S1, There is weblena, but it's minor and towards the end mostly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-13
Updated: 2019-03-13
Packaged: 2019-11-16 16:06:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18097649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rayj4ck/pseuds/Rayj4ck
Summary: Lena deserves a good parental figure. Thankfully one just happens to be hanging out on the moon, not doing much.





	Ticket home

**Author's Note:**

> Will I follow the canon Ducktales timeline? Not on purpose. Will characters be at least a little ooc? Almost certainly. Will you still read it? Well, you came this far.

**Day 3758**

 

Della was reading over the rocket flight manual for the billionth time when she noticed it. It was getting harder and harder to see. Squinting her eyes, she looked out the window to see the entire moon was being slowly being covered in darkness. Jumping out her window and landing on the ground below, she looked up to the sky and understood. The earth was moving in front of the sun. “Wow! I haven’t seen a total lunar eclipse from this side before!” As Della looked around and saw that the darkness was not stopping, her enthusiasm waned. “Doesn’t look like there’s going to be much to see though.” Leaping back up her rocket to the cockpit, she cracked a glowstick and sat in the pilot’s chair as the blackness closed in. It was like having her eyes closed, and if she had woken up to this instead of seeing it happen, she would have worried she was going blind. But after ten or so minutes, the world began to fade back in. “Awesome!” Della exclaimed, throwing her nearly spent glowstick out the window, but as she did, she spotted something odd out of the corner of her eye. “No…”

 

**Day 1**

 

Lena had felt shadow teleportation before. The feeling of cold water overtaking your body, but still being able to breathe. 

This did not feel like that. This felt like she was being fed through a nine-dimensional paper shredder, and then reassembled by a toddler on his 23rd Pixie Stick. It was all she could do to curl into the fetal position, close her eyes, and try not to scream her throat bloody. Just when she thought it would go on forever, it stopped. She felt hard ground below her. Opening her eyes, she took a deep breath.

And then a set of all new problems began. Because she didn’t take a breath. She opened her bill, and it felt like someone put a plunger over it and tried to yank all the air out of her lungs. Grabbing her throat, she clawed her hands as if she could grab a fistful of air and push it into her mouth herself. Before she could think another thought, a hand was over her bill, closing it. 

“I know. I know.” a voice she didn’t know said, understanding etched into the words. “Chew this. It will be gross, but it will keep you alive.” Something was quickly shoved into her mouth, and she started chewing. A shock raced up her body as she tasted it, but air was in her mouth, so she wasn’t complaining. Taking several greedy breaths, she filled her lungs again. And immediately rolled over to retch into the dirt. Whatever Magica had done to her apparently emptied her stomach, because nothing came out. 

After the cleanest vomiting fit she’d ever seen or experienced, Lena had a chance to look at her surroundings. Her mind provided her with the answer to the gray dust and starry sky with a suspiciously blue ball, but she refused to accept it. No way that was possible. 

“Who are you?”

Lena looked to her right and saw another duck there. Pointing a sharp piece of metal at her. 

“Wha? Who are you? How am I here?” Lena coughed out, her throat still raw. She swore that this lady looked familiar somehow, despite being sure she had never met her before. It was right on the edge of her mind.

“I’m asking the questions. I’ve only ever seen that type of magic from one person, and she was Uncle Scrooge’s archenemy.” She leveled the spear at Lena’s chest. “Who are you and how do you know Magica de Spell?”

“Oh, you know Aunt Magica. Great.” Lena grumbled, thoroughly done with Magica herself after the events of the day.

“Aunt? Magica didn’t have any siblings.” Della’s eyes widened. “Right? She didn’t have any siblings right?”

“No, no she didn’t. It’s complicated lady, so I don’t wa- wait you know Scrooge?”

“He’s my uncle.”

“So you’re related to Donald and the boys?”

The woman was in her face so fast Lena could’ve sworn she teleported. “You know my children?” There was a manic glint to her eyes, and with her standing this close, Lena finally remembered where she had seen her before. In the painting.

During one of her sleepovers with Webby (or as Magica had called them, infiltration missions), she had come across an internal door with seven locks on it. Sure that there was some clue about Scrooge’s lucky dime on the other side, Magica made her go through the mind-numbingly long process of opening each lock. When she finally got inside, she was disappointed. The only thing in the tiny room was a painting hanging on the wall of three people. Lena recognized Donald and Scrooge, but the lady on Scrooge’s other side was a mystery. Until today.

“Uh, Huey Dewey and Louie? Yeah, we’re…I know them. Here.” Lena pulled out her phone. No service, obviously, but she still had a bunch of pictures saved in the camera roll. “One sec. Most of these are me and Webby.” A pang ripped through her chest as she scrolled through them, but she pushed it back. Eventually, she came to a group shot Webby had made her take. Turning the phone to the lady, she held it out to her.

And Della got to see her children for the first time in her whole life.

Tears welled up in her eyes as she gently took the phone was Lena’s hands. There they were, smiling at the camera. “Oh boys.” She whispered as she tried to memorize every inch of the photo. They sat like that for a while, Lena wondering if she was about to die for the third time in the past 12 hours, Della trying to make up for 10 years with one single snapshot moment. Eventually, she wiped her eyes and looked to Lena again. “How does someone related to Magica de Spell become friends with my children?”

Lena started to speak, half a lie already on her tongue, ready to finish the rest as she went. But then she paused. She noticed the lack of a voice whispering in her ear. For the first time in her life, she was alone.

So she told the truth. All of it. Her creation at Mount Vesuvius, the years with no one but Magica who cared about her (which even then wasn’t true, she bitterly noted. But at least Magica pretended), hitchhiking, sneaking and stowing away to Duckberg. Meeting Webby, slipping past defenses, mole people money shark other bin lucky dime eclipse death number one death number two pain like she had never felt crazy lady with a spear. After it was all told, Lena took a gasping breath, not realizing she had spoken the last couple paragraphs in one frantic breath. Calming back down, she ended with “Since I can’t see an ever-growing hurricane of shadows spreading across the planet, looks like the McDucks did it. But…”

“But now you’re stuck here.” The spear was on the ground, had been for a while now.

“Yep.”

Della looked at this dejected 15 year old for a long moment. “I’m sorry Lena.”

“Huh? Really?” Lena looked up, surprised. “I almost caused like, the apocalypse. I definitely brought some serious pain on your family.”

“Heh. Get in line kid.” Della slid over next to Lena and looked up at the Earth with her. Despite the pain of being trapped here for so long. Della had to admit it never did get old.

“I think you did pretty well, considering you had one role model your entire life, and it was Magica de Spell.”

“I didn’t do anything good until the end though.”

“You still did something good though.” Della countered and bumped her shoulder against Lena’s. When there wasn’t a response, she sighed and looked back to the Earth. “Besides, if you insist on paying penance for your past, there’s no better place than here.”

 

**Day 3801/43**

 

Lena wiped the sweat off her forehead and stood up. Apparently, to keep her muscles from atrophying away into something with the strength of pencil lead, she had to keep up an intense physical exercise regimen. Gravity may be lower on the moon, but if you piled enough stuff in your hands, it started to add up. Della, who Lena determined carried the crazy gene like all the McDucks and people they hung out with long enough, could apparently lift the entire gold-tech engine if she had to, which even with the moon’s gravity in play felt like it weighed as much as an empty minivan. Lena didn’t expect to get that far, but if she ever did make it back to Earth, she didn’t want her own body to crush itself under it’s own weight. And Lena was good at doing what she had to do to get what she wanted. 

“Heads up!” Della’s voice pulled her out of her own mind. Turning, she saw a spear floating toward her in a lazy arc. Grabbing it out of the air, she focused on Della, who was bounding up to her. “Tick’s coming.”

“Ugh. This thing just does not know when to quit.”

“Well, neither do we,” Della replied, landing beside her and dropping into a fighting stance. 

“Right.”   
  


“You know, I always figured shadow magic was one of the strongest forms of magic, even if I didn’t like the users. Uh, no offense!”

Lena lay gently in her hammock, which gave her the small comfort of feeling like she was just floating on air. “No none taken. But how so?” 

“Well, darkness is the natural state of the universe.”

“Really?”

“Sure. All the light we get is just coming from the big fireball we get swung around on a daily basis. If you look close enough, between the photons, you’ll find darkness smaller than atoms. All around you.”

“Huh. No kidding.”

That night Lena dreamed she was chasing a firefly through an open field. It was fast and cornered to quickly for her to reach, but she knew that if she could run faster and turn sharper, she could catch it.

 

**Day 3815/57**

 

“So you’re doing what again?”

“Meditation mostly. Trying to deepen my understanding of magic.”

“Sounds cool!”

“Yeah. I’m not that great at the science stuff, so I figured I could leave that to you. I’m at least decent at magic, so I might as well work on that with nothing else to do.”

“I don’t know a lot about magic, but I feel like defying Magica de Spell’s will when she could not be more powerful makes you more than just ‘decent’.” Della gave her that grin that Lena had never seen on anyone else before, that one that made her feel like she was sitting just the right distance from a warm fire. Blushing at the praise, she turned away. 

“Yeah well, let’s see if this goes anywhere first.” Lena didn’t want to Give Della false hope with her half-an-idea that had never been done before.

“You work on the mystic, I’ll work on the scientific!” Della cheered, throwing her arms up. 

“Deal.”   
  


**Day 3922/164**

 

It happened so suddenly, Lena wasn’t even remotely ready. She had been working on pushing her senses deeper and deeper, looking for darkness in the smallest of places. She was happy to see that, with nothing but time on her hands and the unbeatable zen-like silence on the moon, she could push further than she expected. But today when she pushed herself beyond where she had been before, she felt something give. Like a thin sheet of ice breaking beneath her, she fell into an infinite ocean. Opening her eyes, she was faced with what she could best comprehend as TV static. Everything shifting and racing by and there was no noise but it was thundering in her ears but her body wasn’t even there and and and and

“Lena! Lena wake up!”

Snapping her eyes open, for real this time, she looked up to Della’s face, framed by the unending cosmos. When had she gotten on her back?

“You were convulsing, your eyes had gone blacker had anything I’ve ever seen. And I look out into space on a daily basis. Are you Ok? What happened?”

“I did it.” Lena sat up, and Della put a hand on her back when she tipped dangerously.

“Woah woah. Lie down.” Della said, gently pushing Lena back down onto the lunar dirt. “What did you do?”

“Teleporting between two connected shadows is really easy, right? When you said that thing about photons and the darkness of the universe, I started thinking-”

“That if you could slip between the photons-”

“Then I could get us home.”

“Lena that’s amazing!” Della lit up briefly, but her face fell. “But you were in real pain. It’s not worth it to-”

“It’s Ok.” Lena cut her off. “I just wasn’t ready. I know what to expect now. I can do this.”

“Lena…”

“I can get us out of here!” Lena shouted. “You want that, right? You want to see your kids again!” She waved her phone, long dead, in the air. “I can do it!”

Della gritted her teeth. Bringing up the boys was a low blow, but some instinct deep in her gut told her that Lena was only doing this out of some unhealthy desire to prove herself worthy. But she couldn’t deny her own ignorance of magic, so she couldn’t know if Lena could actually do this. Della knew for sure that she couldn’t stop the teen from trying though. Pulling Lena into a tight hug, she settled on whispering “Just don’t burn yourself out, Ok? Can you tell me you’ll do that?”

Lena, surprised, put her arms around Della more on instinct than anything else. Nonetheless, she answered back with a firm “I won’t.”

 

**Day 3962/204**

 

“Raaaagh!” Lena exclaimed in frustration. She couldn’t throw herself down onto her hammock in anger, due to the low gravity and the fact that it would flip her right out onto the floor. She settled for punching the metal wall in anger. “I can’t figure it out! I can get there just fine, but everything is changing too fast to make a pathway!”

“Huh?” Della asked from her nest of blankets, rags, and anything else moderately comfy. With Lena spending so much time meditating, she didn’t have a chance to learn more about magic. 

“When you shadow jump, you need two out of three things. The start, the end, or the path. You always have the start, duh. It’s where you are. Normally finding one of the other two is easy, but the landscape keeps changing too fast for me to make a path. And If I just pick “The Earth” as the destination, there’s no telling where we end up! 70% chance it’s the ocean!” 

“So you need some kind of anchor on earth?”

“Yes! Something sturdy, stable, but bright enough..to...stand out.” Lena trailed off, looking to the wall next to her hammock. In the beginning of her time on the moon, she had taken to her poetry to occupy her time. Eventually, she drifted away from it, since there was only so much you could write about gray dirt, the earth, and the cosmos. But one poem always held her attention. 

Dropping down onto the floor, Lena closed her eyes. “Uh, are you Ok?” Della leaned over her nest to look over at Lena. “It’s cool. Just trying something new.” Lena replied as she dove deep again. She felt herself falling slowly for a while, until she carefully landed on that thin layer between her and the static with practiced ease. Taking a deep breath, she pushed through. Over the months, she had learned how to narrow her sight to keep herself from being overwhelmed. Feeling the Earth far in the distance, she raised her hands and focused. 

“With the hand of my best friend. I bring about the money shark’s end.” She breathed out to herself, as she remembered how it felt to hold Webby’s hand, feel that new type of magic envelop her. “With the hand of my best friend, I bring about the money shark’s end.” She remembered Webby herself. The energy, the bow, the friendship bracelet. Unending interest in anything she didn’t know, how she wanted to share it all with her, Lena. How she wanted to give Lena the whole world. “With the hand of my best friend,” Lena felt more than saw all the chaotic, varied magic of Earth fade away until one single, glowing point of blue remained, shining like a lighthouse out to sea. “I will find my way home again.” Lena resurfaced to her body, unable to keep the grin off her face. “Did it.”

“Did it?” Della looked over, confused.

“I found an anchor point.” 

“Amazing!” Della jumped up and raced over to Lena, hugging her tight. 

“Thank you, thank you.” Lena allowed herself to laugh a bit, sharing in Della’s excitement. “But there is one problem left. One I’ve been avoiding thinking about.” 

“One problem? I’m sure the two of us can handle it.”

“Power. Normal shadow jumping is really easy, but it’s probably a mile at most. But now-”

“At almost 400 million meters-”

“Oh Jesus that many?” Lena squeaked out, eyes going wide.

Before Della could reply, a rumble shook the ground. Racing over to the window, Della could see the moon tick coming. “Ok, I have had just about enough of this guy!” Della shouted. “Lena, you wait here and rest. I’ll handle this.” Vaulting out the window, Della went to confront their nemesis.

 

Lena sighed and looked worryingly toward the broken window. All had gone silent a little while ago, but doing shadow magic as complicated as she has been twice in one day still tired her out, and she knew if she went to help Della she would only be a liability. So all she could do was wait anxiously. 

“Lena, you might want to come down here!” Della’s voice called up, and Lena complied quickly. Floating down, she said “Oh thank the gods! When everything went silent I thought HOLY SHIT WHO ARE THEY?” Lena landed, and when she looked up she saw two aliens standing next to her. Her first instinct was to scramble back against the hull of the rocket. “No no, it’s ok! They’re friendly! Penumbra and I are already tight!”

“That is a lie.” The shorter alien added.

“But it’s Ok! Because you know what they have?”

“Laser blasters.” 

“Yes! But not just that! They have GOLD.”

“...I thought you said the ship was unfixable?”

“Not for the ship! Just the generator! Because gold plus generator means POWER.”

Lena’s eyes widened even more, which she didn’t think was possible. “You can’t mean-”

“Oh I do!” Della was practically wild at this point. “We’re gonna supercharge you!”

 

**Day 4118/360**

 

It had taken them much longer than they had expected, having made breakthroughs so quickly earlier. But if Della Duck was two things, it was efficient with her manic energy and unquestionably inspiring. It took a lot of work on Della’s part to extract and rebuild the engine, and Lena had to pretty much invent her own magical glyph that would convert electrical energy of that scale and voltage into usable magical power without turning her inside out from the energy levels. Both of them had at least one explosion occur in the process, and Della insisted on many MANY tests to make sure Lena wasn’t electrocuted, but finally they were here. All their testing had come back promising, and it was time to shoot for the moon. So to speak. 

“Ready Lena?” Della called from her position on the engine.

“Ready!” Lena called back, flexing her fingers in the work gloves they had repurposed. Lena had, very carefully, drawn her sigil onto the back of the hand, and Della had threaded the wires from the generator through them. “There won’t be time to say goodbyes though. If I can make the connection, we’re going.”

“Noted.” Della turned toward the general and lieutenant. “Thank you. For everything you’ve done for us. Given us.” The general nodded in return, and Della turned back to the generator. A basketball-sized lump of gold was floating gently inside, and Della looked at her reflection in the glass before coming to her decision. “Ignition!” She called, throwing the switch. Inside the generator, the gold began to glow with intense light and spin like a top. Della left the engine and ran over to Lena, who was taking deep breaths. Della saw the runes on the gloves starting to glow as well. Putting a hand on Lena’s shoulder, Della nodded to her. “You can do this.” 

Lena nodded back and focused. She slipped down into the static almost instantly and concentrated on Webby’s glowing magic so far off in the distance. Unseen to her, her body began to glow, a combination of light blue and unfathomable black. The glow grew and grew, forcing Della to shield her eyes with her free hand. “This might hurt!” Lena had just enough time to shout before all the light around them imploded.

 

**Day 1**

 

Webby grunted as she was thrown to the ground again. “Not bad Webbigail, but you must pay attention to your opponent’s feet as well as their hands.” Beakly informed her as she offered a hand to pull her back to her feet.

“Yes Granny.” Webby replied and got into her battle stance again. Off further along the grounds, the boys, Scrooge, and Donald were practicing their swordplay. Or rather, Scrooge and the boys were practicing their swordplay. Donald was practicing his heart attacks. Duckworth was having an army of lawnmowers cut the grass on the other side of the tennis court. Launchpad was attempting to ride one of the mowers like a surfboard.

“Now, what is your first move?” Beakly quizzed.

“First,” Webby started, itching her wrist where her friendship bracelet was still tied. She couldn’t seem to bring herself to take it off. “I move around to the blind spot on their left. Next, I…” Webby stopped, feeling her wrist heating up. Looking down to it, her jaw went slack as she saw it glowing. It was faint, but growing brighter and brighter by the second. “I, I uh, are you seeing this?” Beakly, looking over to Webby, and her eyes widened at her arm, now glowing brighter than a set of car headlights. “Take it off Webbigail. Take it off!”

“I can’t!” Webby cried. “It’s too hot!” She couldn’t make her fingers hold it, and she was had her arm as far away from her body as she could. Looking up, she saw the boys running over, calling her name. They had just gotten in reaching distance when the bracelet exploded in a brilliant display of blinding blue light. All of them were thrown away from the blast, across the lawn. 

Webby, stunned, could only stare up at the sky for a few seconds, the ringing in her ears a familiar feeling from all the explosions she had been around before.  Holding her head, she looked down at her wrist and saw that the bracelet was destroyed. Only a few weakly bound threads remained, and as she watched they came undone and floated away in the gentle breeze. Looking up toward the crater, her jaw hit the ground. There, covered in singed feathers and dry heaving on the grass, were Della Duck and Lena. “My god.” She looked to her left and saw that her Granny was just as astounded. Looking beyond them, she saw that the boys and Scrooge were still recovering, but Donald was kneeling on the grass, staring at the two they had all thought were dead for so long. Even Duckworth, for the first time she had ever seen, had lost his composure, his eyes as wide and slackjawed as everyone else’s. Getting to her feet, she felt frozen in time, unable to move, staring at the pair as if she looked away they would disappear back to the underworld. That is, until Lena looked over to her with a weak smile and what was probably a whispered “Hey Pink”, although she was too far away to hear it. Then, like a spell was broken, Webby ran to Lena so fast she wasn’t even aware she was doing it until she tackled Lena back to the ground, squeezing her in a hug as hard as she could, tears seeping into Lena’s (disgusting smelling) gray striped sweater. To her side, she could hear more thumps as what she assumed were Huey Dewey and Louie did the same to Della, but she was too busy to check. Caught up in the euphoria, she planted kisses all over Lena’s face. On her neck, under her bill, on her bill, her cheeks, her eyebrows, anything she could reach. 

“Webb, We, pphhfb, Webby! Webby you can let go now!”

“No way. Never again.” Webby choked out through her tears. Lena chuckled back to her and planted a much gentler kiss on her beak. Webby deepened their kiss, and held it until-

“Phwa! Ack!” She broke off, gagging. “Black licorice? Gross!” Lena’s eyes lit up and locked with Della’s, before they both turned their heads to the side and spat their gum out onto the lawn. “Freedom!” Della cheered, and Lena threw up her arms (under Webby’s) and whooped in agreement. 

“Wha-how?” Scrooge, barely able to speak past his own shock, asked. Della smiled and put a hand on Lena’s shoulder. “I bet your stance on magic hasn’t changed since I left, but you might want to make an exception for this girl. She’s pretty amazing.”

Suddenly they were all looking at her, and Lena was very frozen. Until she felt a second pair of arms wrap around her, and the brim of a hat press into her back. “Uuuhh, this is weird.”

“Shut up.” Said Dewey to her left, also hugging her. “You saved our mom from the moon.”

“You don’t get a choice.” Louie finished, finishing the hug circle she was suddenly in the middle of. Of course, no one would see it to protect Lena’s reputation, but there might’ve been some shed tears that afternoon. And that night, two people gone far too long got to fall asleep next to people they loved.

 

Many, many miles away, Selene sat in her temple, grinning the type of grin only a goddess who knows more than a mortal ever could can grin. “Good job kid,” she said, to herself apparently. “I knew you could do it.”


End file.
